Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary

Prologue: Modernist Philosophy and the History of Theory

I know that I shall die without spiritual heirs (and it is a good thing). My legacy is like one in cold cash divided among many heirs, and each converts his portion into an enterprise of some sort that corresponds to his nature: whose provenance in that inheritance is not visible.

Georg Simmel¹

Certain figures in the history of thought seem to derive their significance from their marginality. Never quite forgotten, often the objects of devoted scholarly followings yet largely unread by nonspecialists, they enjoy wider fame mainly in the form of cliché—thus Herodotus is said to be the father of lies, Montaigne the inventor of the essay, Musil the chronicler of a Vienna that perished in the Great War. So, too, Georg Simmel (1858–1918) is known, if at all, as one of the founding fathers of modern social science and the author of a single work, the Philosophy of Money, which remains by and large unread. This truncated form of memory contains in nuce the dynamic of marginalization: a complex intellectual legacy reduced to a work that is itself misunderstood when Simmel is celebrated as the first sociologist of modernity.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the human costs of progress were inescapably apparent. What we have come to think of as the founding texts of modern social science were part of a broader discourse on modern society and culture suffused with ambiguity and contradiction; they belong to the world that gave rise to Spengler and Nordau, Nietzsche and Weininger. The same ambivalence concerning the meaning and value of what has come to be called modernization also shaped efforts by Marx and Weber, Durkheim and Freud, to forge conceptual means for coming to terms with what was happening around them. The resulting tensions between analysis and interpretation, objectivity and critique, empiricism and moralism mark their work and inflect their methodological strategies and theoretical perspectives.

The complexity and nuance of what came to be canonical texts tend to be obscured when the story of the emergence of the social sciences is being told. In the case of Simmel, simplifying his highly multivalent undertakings into cliché allows a thinker who fits only with difficulty into the dominant disciplinary paradigm to be assimilated to the contemporary social sciences. At the same time, it obscures how the origins of sociology are related to a new kind of philosophical investigation both defined by and centered on specifically modern cultural circumstances.

Such clichés and misprisions are, then, not without interest for the history of thought in general and for reflection on the emergence of modern social and cultural theory in particular. Intellectual history lives from the reduction of ideas to sound bites—but also from the recovery of ambiguities flattened out by narratives that have lost their force. In the case of the history of modern social thought, questions about the philosophical status of reflection on social structures and mechanisms are, furthermore, imbricated with problems of historiography tout court. What constitutes the history of (cultural) theory? How can it be distinguished from the disciplinary histories of the social sciences? Where do silences, gaps, and obfuscations fit into the story? What, in the final account, is the meaning of marginality in theory?

The case of Georg Simmel underlines how epistemological questions concerning the status of social scientific concepts and methods are linked to historiographical concerns of both a general and a specific, institutional or disciplinary, nature. Simmel’s significance as a cultural and social theorist comprises both his philosophical achievements and a considerable, yet largely unrecognized, impact on his students and readers. His innovative approach to cultural interpretation brought the legacy of the German philosophical tradition into conversation with the phenomena of everyday modern life, and the influence of his ideas and modernist style of philosophizing extends through figures as diverse as Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, György Lukács, Robert Musil, and Robert Park.

But this very diversity—or put in another way, the absence of a school or doctrine of any sort—has helped to render Simmel’s intellectual influence virtually invisible. To write his conceptual and methodological innovations into the history of twentieth-century thought therefore requires not just an encounter with his writings but also an interrogation of the nature of his influence and of the reasons it has gone unrecognized. And it entails taking seriously Simmel’s insistence, expressed as early as 1899, that despite his reputation abroad, he was not, in fact, a sociologist: I am a philosopher, see my life’s vocation in philosophy, and only pursue sociology as a sideline.² In a word, the case of Simmel foregrounds how fundamental questions about what used to be called the history of ideas are for understanding our own disciplinary context and intellectual world.

In the pages that follow, I hope to avoid both the Scylla of overspecialization—taking Simmel’s importance for granted and treating his texts as canonical ends in themselves—and the Charybdis of appropriation—making the case for Simmel’s significance by situating his oeuvre in relation to a metanarrative defined by contemporary interests tangential or even foreign to his self-professed understanding of his work. In the first instance, it is a matter of taking seriously the question of how to read him. Simmel was a lavishly published author, not only of sociological treatises but also of popular works on philosophy, meditations on canonical and contemporary artists and writers, scores of essays on cultural phenomena from fashion to cities to femininity—and criticism, poetry, and fiction to boot. The sheer complexity of his texts makes demands on the reader that call for more thorough conceptualization, while the diversity and range of his oeuvre (or to put it less generously, his lack of clearly defined disciplinary identity) pose challenges of another order.

This book does not attempt to give a comprehensive account of this formidable body of work, let alone an exhaustive one. Rather, by approaching Simmel as a modernist philosopher—by foregrounding his innovative style of thought and drawing attention to the affinity between his methods of interpretation and broader modernist cultural developments—I hope to persuade my own readers to (re)turn to the texts themselves in a new way. To approach Simmel as a modernist in this writerly sense decenters not only received accounts of his significance as a thinker but also of the fin de siècle origins of modern social thought and cultural theory in general and of the discipline of sociology in particular. Embracing rather than erasing his marginality, I reframe the question of how to read this multiform oeuvre in relation to the disciplinary traditions that have shaped Simmel’s reception. Attending to the legacy of his style of thought casts new light on the history of social and cultural theory, enabling us to ask anew what constitutes rigorous inquiry into the constitutive structures of collective existence in the modern world.

My project depends on a body of specialized scholarship—most notably on the work of those who labored over more than two decades on the historical-critical edition of his works—of which it cannot, properly speaking, form a part. To be sure, it is grounded in textual and contextual evidence amassed, often for the first time, in the Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe (GSG) realized under the general editorship of Otthein Rammstedt between 1989 and 2015. However, my project parts ways, of necessity, with the philological objectives and hermeneutic principles that define a historical-critical edition as such and that make faithful reconstruction and historical contexualization ends in themselves. Insisting on the importance of critical and theoretical self-reflection on the categories and perspectives in and through which such (canonizing) reconstruction and narrative contextualization take place, this book aims to liberate resources in Simmel’s oeuvre for our own time and for the future.

In the final instance, the plausibility of my interpretation depends on a vision of the tasks of thought in modernity that cannot, sensu strictu, be derived from empirical evidence. Historical-critical contextualization is important. But giving a plausible account of Simmel’s intellectual contributions entails imaginatively reconstructing a vision of philosophy and an approach to philosophizing in many ways quite foreign to contemporary sensibilities. Representation and understanding are intertwined, for the thinker cannot be entirely separated from the thought.

We cannot simply return to the texts themselves to disclose what Simmel might have called the individual law of his oeuvre. Another history, that of generations of interpretation, stands between the reader and this thinking. To determine what his texts mean for us, we must first free them—and Simmel himself—from the effects of a reception history that has obscured much of what is most interesting and important about his work. The historical and sociological task of contextualization and the hermeneutic and philosophical challenges of interpretation intermingle.

Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary thus sets out onto the territory disclosed by the historical and critical work of the Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe, but it explores that terrain to very different and often diametrically—or dialectically—opposed ends. The critical edition has established Simmel’s place in what one of the most distinguished members of the editorial group, the late Klaus Chistian Köhnke, called "the classical period [Klassik] of the human and social sciences."³ Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary returns him to his historical and cultural context with the aspiration of helping to disclose the unrealized and as it were unclassical potential of his texts and practices. In calling attention to the ways in which unrecognized investments of the cold cash of Simmel’s legacy have shaped our contemporary intellectual landscape, my object is to draw attention to what institutionalized modes of commemorating the founding father exclude or forget: the Simmel who did not and perhaps could not become a classic in the canonical sense, whose oeuvre arguably calls into question the institutional framework of canonicity itself.

From the beginning, Simmel’s thought transgressed disciplinary and institutional strictures. In the course of the twentieth century, as the contours of the contemporary disciplines emerged, what is known in German as the Wirkungsgeschichte—literally, the history of effects—of his work in sociology took on contours that obscured the breadth and complexity of his philosophical and theoretical achievement, particularly in the Anglophone world. To appreciate the significance of the new vistas on Simmel’s oeuvre opened up by the critical edition, it will be necessary to clarify how his reception has been shaped by a disciplinary ordering of knowledge practices that we take for granted today—in particular, by the very different modes of reading and understanding both texts and historical evidence proper to social scientific as opposed to humanistic inquiry. Simmel’s identification as a (mostly forgotten) founding father of sociology has given him a role in modern intellectual history at the cost of obscuring his substantial philosophical contributions. But this is getting ahead of the story.

Simmel is often classified as a neo-Kantian. His concern to link epistemological and ethical frames of reference and his distinctive approach to the problem of form speak for such a contextualization of his thought, as do his many books and essays dealing directly with Kant’s philosophy, which he taught throughout his entire career, and, indeed, his long friendship with Heinrich Rickert.⁴ Even if Simmel cannot properly be regarded as belonging to a neo-Kantian school,⁵ his work is in many ways recognizably and undeniably Kantian in inspiration. The signs of Simmel’s allegiance to a Kantian idiom and sensibility are pervasive: his emphasis on the epistemological foundations of inquiry and on the ethical self-determination of the individual; his recurrent invocation of the tenet of the ultimate inaccessibility of the thing in itself; even the division of the Philosophy of Money into analytic and synthetic parts.

And yet, as the existence of a radically different competing characterization of Simmel as a Lebensphilosoph, a philosopher of life,⁶ underlines, this is hardly the whole story. In a 1908 letter to Hermann Graf Keyserling, Simmel confessed that he had again become embroiled in the sort of epistemological-metaphysical questions that had occupied him earlier in his career,

once again with the feeling that we are just going round like squirrels on a wheel in this whole epistemology that rests on Kantian presuppositions. What a thing this man did to the world by declaring it to be a representation! When will the genius come along who frees us from the spell of the subject as Kant freed us from that of the object? And what will the third be?⁷

To pigeon-hole Simmel as a neo-Kantian is to discount the depth and significance of this epistemological crisis. It entails ignoring his flirtation with irrationalism; his recurrent attention to materiality, embodiment, and the emotions; his fascination with historical specificity and cultural difference, with the challenges of thinking a world gripped in flux.

In a word, Simmel is as much a reader of Nietzsche as of Kant. Indeed, as I shall show, he is one of the greatest and most subtly influential readers of Nietzsche altogether, for in his modernist approach to culture the inherited resources of the philosophical tradition are transformed before our eyes. As in the case of Kant, Simmel creatively and constructively appropriates his predecessor’s insights and strategies of thought. The significance for his work of what Nietzsche called the death of God can hardly be overestimated; Simmel’s metaphysical relativism and emphasis on the perspectival nature of truth and his distinctive approach to ethics are clearly Nietzschean in inspiration; and his sociology involves, among other things, a rethinking of genealogy itself.

Like Nietzsche, Simmel was profoundly concerned with the question of the future of European culture in general in light of the rise of modern science—and with the problem of the future of Bildung, of the cultural task of education, in the post-1871 German university in particular. Like Nietzsche, he was profoundly influenced by Goethe as a thinker and artist and as the exemplar of a specifically human vitality and integrity. In a 1913 monograph, Simmel described his life as a flowing unity: Goethe’s unceasing experimenting and reformulating of possible standpoints, the development that flowed through all the contradictions of his long life permits endless possible interpretations of that unity and totality; it also provides a model for integrating multiple, changing perspectives and development through contradiction without sublation.⁸ Not least, Simmel, too, found inspiration in the (Goethean, but also romantic) fascination with synecdoche and developed philosophical strategies that elevated fragments into windows onto sociocultural and historical wholes.

Yet Simmel’s writing, like Nietzsche’s, is self-consciously situated at a moment when the rationalist pieties of nineteenth-century Wissenschaft were coming into crisis: when the realities of industrialization were undermining faith in technological progress, and Goethean holism and organicism were beginning to give way to more sinister forms of longing for totality. It is in this broader intellectual-historical context that the question of whether and in what sense Simmel ought to be characterized as a philosopher of life must be posed. This question is imbricated with the more general issue of his place in intellectual history altogether—and especially with the implications of Simmel’s thinking for the return to the topos of life in contemporary theoretical work. Here, too, his modernist style of thought, with its self-reflexive relation to problems of life and form, lends Simmel’s writing a new actuality.

In her incisive monograph Die geistige gestalt Georg Simmels (Georg Simmel [as] Spiritual Gestalt), the philosopher and poet Margarete Susman (Margarete von Bendemann) (1872–1966), a former student who belonged to Simmel’s close circle of friends, highlights his striving to find a new way of philosophizing beyond dualities: With his disinclination for the system, which was grounded for him in the essence of thinking itself, Simmel never represented the three and the third in systematic form. Nonetheless it permeates his philosophy. Always it is something unreachable, for which he seeks names and concepts.⁹

Susman goes on to cite the first aphorism in Simmel’s posthumously published journal, where he takes issue with the received view that we must belong either to the natural or the transcendent world. Rather, Simmel writes, we belong to a third, unutterable [world], of which the natural and the transcendent alike are mirrorings, discharges, falsifications, interpretations (GSG 20: 261). According to Susman, "All of Simmel’s efforts as a thinker are to be understood as such mirrorings and interpretations of a third. Subject and object, life and death, being and duty [Sein und Sollen], reality and idea are to be reconciled in a third, still undiscovered, yet to be discovered spirit- and life-form [noch zu entdeckenden Geistes- und Lebensform]."

In recent years, Simmel has become increasingly recognized as a key avatar of a thinking of the third, and in this there is still much to be learned from him.¹⁰ Yet his vision of spiritual and cultural renewal belong to a world utterly lost to us. As Susman underlined, Simmel’s death at the end of the First World War marks the boundary at which a new form of thinking commences. Looking back, she reflected on its origins: in the two great wars the human being had lost its countenance, and thus Western philosophy as a whole had really arrived at its end. A new thinking and a new language were needed to express the thinking of a new time.¹¹

It is misleading to think of Simmel either as a sociologist who also philosophized or as a philosopher who happened to participate in the emergent discipline of sociology. Both views project into the past a professionalized disciplinary order that was still being constituted during his lifetime. Simmel’s vision of the tasks of thought in the modern world led him to make significant practical as well as theoretical contributions to the founding of the modern social sciences. But these contributions were by no means as extrinsic to his philosophical agenda as they appear from contemporary, disciplinary perspectives. Rather, Simmel’s preoccupation with the status and nature of sociology is a constitutive feature of the modernist approach to philosophizing that evolved out of his early proto-positivist conviction that philosophy was becoming obsolete in a world where the science of man has become the science of human society.¹² Placing that intellectual evolution in the context of the global shifts in modes of inquiry and in rhetorics of reflection under way in this period will throw seemingly self-evident distinctions between social science and philosophy, and more generally between empirical and theoretical inquiry, into relief.

With the canonizers, then, I urge a return to Simmel’s oeuvre as the crucial repository of largely forgotten resources for social and cultural theory. One of the principal objects of this book is to uncover something of the history of effects through which, in the course of the twentieth century, Simmel’s ideas and strategies of thought were absorbed and transformed in ways that not only rendered their origins illegible but also squandered their full theoretical and practical potential for reflection on modern life. If we are to recover that potential, we need to understand the larger philosophical project from which even the most sophisticated readings of Simmel as sociologist abstract his ideas and methods. We cannot brush away ambiguity by returning to the texts themselves, because an adequate account of Simmel’s thought must also explain the peculiarities of his reception, including the fact that the same texts are regularly understood to substantiate diametrically opposed positions and methodological commitments.

To be sure, Simmel has been read selectively; misleading and even distorting appropriations have decisively shaped his reception. Yet doing justice to his internally complex oeuvre entails more than correcting errors. The question—as with Freud, Durkheim, or Weber, for that matter—is how to come to terms with the ambiguity and opacity that mark the path of thought that has not yet solidified into certainty regarding the meaning or even the nature of its objects. In Simmel’s case, this difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that his modernist approach to philosophizing entails a radical openness to interpretation. The multivocity of Simmel’s texts reflects a sophisticated awareness of the relativity of thought and of the challenges of capturing symbolically and intersubjectively constructed realities in concepts.

Simmel was acutely aware of the limits and contingency of his own insights and approach, yet he was explicitly committed to a vision of thought as exceeding its own time. As a self-consciously historical thinker of the social, he strove to develop methods of analysis and strategies of interpretation that could be extracted from their contexts of origin and put to use for quite different purposes. However important and necessary it is to identify some of the unmarked bills of Simmel’s legacy, this is not the same thing as coming to terms with his oeuvre itself.

The mature Simmel embraced a perspectival relativism that feels very contemporary today—yet, by its very nature, we cannot simply adopt it. For he wrote in ways that invite, indeed, demand, reflection on the relativity and contingency of his own claims. His texts are modernist in drawing attention to their own writtenness so as to catalyze awareness of the constitutive role of perspective in human understanding—and hence of the relativity of every knowledge claim, including Simmel’s own. To address texts that formally evoke reflection on the relativity of perspectives in this way, methodological and theoretical discussions must be enriched by critical and historical modes of thinking about form. Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary attempts, then, both to clarify how and why Simmel arrived at his relativist understanding of culture, society, and the human and to grasp the strategies of thought and writing through which he inscribed openness to multiple interpretations in his philosophizing.

To read Simmel not only as a modern thinker, or even a thinker of modernity, but as a modernist entails reconceiving the relationship between his oeuvre and its historical, cultural, and theoretical context. To do justice to the historicity as well as the philosophical seriousness of his modernist conception of form also requires a broader reconsideration of received narratives about the emergence of modern social science. My examination of Simmel’s reception reveals how the genealogy that bifurcates those disciplines from their origins in philosophy and history also severs the methodological questions that animate today’s social sciences from the concerns of theory as understood in the contemporary humanistic disciplines. To draw attention to the synthetic features of Simmel’s thought is to underline the continuity of his approach to theorizing the social with the practices of interpretation and representation that defined modernist culture more broadly—and thereby to illuminate the prehistory of the contemporary disciplinary imaginary.

Simmel’s oeuvre is situated at what were during his lifetime relatively permeable boundaries between philosophy and social science, academic and popular writing. His thinking was shaped by a perspectival relativism that, even as it draws attention to its own conditions of possibility in the phenomenon of subjective experience, exposes the supplementary relations between the knowledge practices of distinct disciplines, particularly between philosophical modes of reflection and social scientific ways of knowing. Read with sensitivity to their historical, cultural, and intellectual context—that is, to the past of our own theoretical practices—Simmel’s writings cast a fresh light on the contemporary disciplinary landscape, providing new perspective on the categories and conceptual divisions that came to structure Western intellectual culture and shape quotidian understandings of modern life in the course of the twentieth century.

The network of assumptions and practices that frame readings of Simmel in disciplinary terms blockades recognition of this wider, transdisciplinary theoretical and historical significance of his work. Not only do we miss a great deal that is of interest when we slice up his oeuvre into disciplinary parts; we reinforce a fragmentation of scholarly life that presents very real institutional and conceptual barriers to meeting the intellectual and cultural challenges of the twenty-first century.

My objective, then, is not simply to show that what have been categorized as Simmel’s sociological works have implications for philosophy and humanistically oriented social and cultural inquiry more generally. Thinking his liminal position can open a new and urgently needed perspective on the contemporary intellectual world, where disciplinary divisions of dubious ontological purchase have become deeply naturalized features of our mental and institutional landscapes. Consider, to take two current trends as examples, that efforts to bring together psychological and philosophical perspectives on the self or to integrate biological perspectives into social science are commonly taken for cutting-edge scholarly innovations. Without historical awareness, such efforts to bring together ideas from different disciplinary spheres all too often culminate in what amounts, as in these cases, to the rediscovery of the wheel—that is, to work that uncovers the shared problematics lurking behind different idioms and methods of intellectual traditions that in fact have common origins.

Failure to reflect on the contingency and perspectival specificity of (naturalized) disciplinary perspectives thus compounds the sort of epistemic errors that Marx and Nietzsche both criticized as the consequence of forgetting (or willfully ignoring) that the conceptual structures and standards that organize our world are themselves produced by human beings. That is, the apparent stability (and institutional reality) of disciplinary categories depends on the same ahistorical confusion of concepts with realities, subjectivity with the world, that issues in the embarrassing spectacles skewered by Nietzsche as analogous to the practice of seeking out truths behind the very shrubbery where one has hidden them. To forget the significance of the subject in the creation of objects in this way is both epistemologically and ethically suspect. As Nietzsche puts it, at bottom the searcher after such truths seeks the metamorphosis of the world into the human being and, in failing to recognize the difference that separates us from the nonhuman, wins at best a feeling of assimilation.¹³

Like both Nietzsche and Marx, Simmel believed that the necessary first step in moving philosophy beyond such anthropomorphic circling and toward a more adequate, historically and culturally articulated conception of truth was to expose the historicity and contingency of our ways of seeing. While his dialectical strategies of interpretation were deeply inflected by Hegel’s phenomenological approach to philosophizing, Simmel did not aspire to overcome contingency by creating a system, but rather maintained a Kantian modesty about the limits of human understanding and self-understanding. Like Nietzsche but unlike Marx, rather than attempting, even imaginatively, to overcome contingency and individuality in an integrative totality, he espoused a perspectival view of truth that affirmed the radical difference and multiplicity of situated points of view. As we shall see, Simmel’s efforts to reconcile this historicist commitment to a perspectival understanding of reality with an old-fashioned aspiration to higher truths animates his evolving conception of his work—and the shifting disciplinary identifications that accompanied it. Along the way, he developed strategies of thought that remain of considerable interest in an intellectual context where fundamental questions about knowledge and identity, culture and perspective, have lost none of their urgency in the intervening generations.

Even though frankly old-fashioned historical questions about Simmel’s intellectual accomplishments and the vicissitudes of his influence over time play a central role in my arguments, the present project is thus far from being what Nietzsche called antiquarian in intent. Indeed, quite in the spirit of a man whose work often flouted scholarly conventions, including, not coincidentally, the footnote,¹⁴ it advocates an appropriation of his thought for present needs. Such appropriation should not be conflated with a collapse of scholarly horizons. It is essential to attend to the differences between his intellectual and cultural starting points and our own. In returning to his texts, it is just as crucial to ask what cannot or should not be appropriated as to discover what can. The pages that follow call for a return to Simmel, but by no means for an uncritical one. Indeed, aspects of his work that are of the greatest interest from a historical perspective—his conception of culture, his reflections on gender—underline the distance between his philosophical perspectives and contemporary points of departure.

As appealing and timely as many of Simmel’s writings remain, and as important as it is to attend not only to his many substantive contributions but also to his methodological achievements, we may in fact have the most to learn from him where the distance is greatest. Simmel’s writing is remarkable in its reflective openness to the sociocultural transformations under way in his lifetime and its author’s wholehearted efforts to discover genuinely new strategies of reflection adequate to the shifting realities of modern life. But the similarities and indeed continuities between the circumstances of our own dawning century and the previous one notwithstanding, there can be no question of identifying our modernity with Simmel’s. Even if the encounter with his ideas can do much to clarify what is at stake today, neither his questions nor his answers can finally be ours.

Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary attempts to return to his oeuvre with an awareness of this historical and conceptual distance. It sets out, to be sure, to examine seriously and thoroughly what remains an underappreciated theoretical and philosophical legacy, to identify Simmel’s recognized and unrecognized contributions to the theoretical and cultural debates of the twentieth century, and to demonstrate the continuing relevance of his methods of cultural analysis. But my guiding purpose is neither to defend his philosophy nor to make the case for the timeliness of his ideas. Instead, I want to ask what we might learn from Simmel about what we most need to know: how to find ways to think differently.

Today, as at the nineteenth-century fin de siècle, inherited strategies of thought have come to seem increasingly inadequate—culturally, politically, theoretically. Simmel, whose fame rested in no small part on his emphatic embrace of modern life, found ways of moving forward without rejecting the achievements of the past. The wager of this book is that his significance as a thinker cannot be captured by a straightforwardly historicist or antiquarian approach—that we must ask, instead, whether Simmel’s oeuvre can provide a model of innovation, a touchstone in our efforts to come to terms with the very different challenges of our own rapidly changing world.

Scholarly enterprise began to take on its contemporary disciplinary contours in the world where he was an internationally famous philosopher and pioneering theorist of the social. To return—in medias res—to Simmel’s texts in search of what has not yet been read into the canonical interpretations entails reflecting on the origins and limitations of our own intuitions and self-understandings in an era when the Western world was being transformed at least as rapidly as it is today—when the organization of knowledge and practices of inquiry, the meaning of art, science, culture, indeed of life itself, already seemed quite radically unsettled.

Part I addresses the relation between history and disciplinarity, exploring how Simmel became who he was—how he came to be represented and understood as a figure at once canonical and marginal in and through a reception that indeed resembles a diffusion of cold cash. As I demonstrate, the very process that established his canonical position as a founding figure of modern social science also obscured the way his work addresses (rather than simply describing) the philosophical dilemmas of that complex, liminal moment when the modern disciplinary imaginary was coming into being. Focusing on the tensions in Simmel’s reception history between attempts to draw attention to his status as a major thinker and innovator and a persistent pattern of selective reading and textual distortion, Part I analyzes how problematic strategies of reading have been made productive for a tradition of thought with which Simmel himself ultimately declined to identify.

In delineating what it means to read him as a (modernist) philosopher rather than a sociologist (of modernity), Part I lays the groundwork for a return in Part II to his 1900 masterpiece, the Philosophy of Money, situating this pivotal work—one of the few after Nietzsche that does or will belong to the canon of philosophy, according to Hans Blumenberg¹⁵—in the larger arc of Simmel’s intellectual and professional development. In the first extended philosophical treatment of the work to appear in English, I demonstrate that Simmel’s phenomenologically articulated, self-consciously relativist approach to the study of social and cultural life remains a valuable theoretical resource for the twenty-first century. Finally, Part III reconsiders the larger meaning of Simmel’s place in the Western scholarly imaginary, reading the reception of his sociology against the grain to illuminate the historical ordering of inquiry today and reveal undisclosed possibilities in the liminal moment before the distinctions between diverse knowledge practices had ossified into the lived boundaries we call disciplines.

Notes

1. This is the epigraph to a collection of aphorisms that the poet and art historian Gertrud Kantorowicz, Georg Simmel’s lover, presented as selections from his diary (my trans.; unless otherwise noted, translations throughout this book are my own). At Simmel’s request, Kantorowicz traveled to Strasbourg in August 1918, and in the final weeks of his life, she worked with him there on editing papers that were to be published posthumously. Selections first appeared in Logos in December 1919 and were reprinted with other material from Simmel’s papers in Fragmente und Aufsätze: Aus dem Nachlaß und Veröffentlichungen der letzen Jahre, ed. Gertrud Kantorowicz (Munich: Drei-Masken, 1923). The diary is included in the Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe (henceforth GSG), ed. Otthein Rammstedt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989–2015), 20: 261–96; quotation here from p. 261. The original manuscript has been lost, and as the editors of the critical edition of the diary remark, "Since [Kantorowicz] does not provide an account of her interventions in the text, no conclusions can be drawn concerning its original form (GSG 20: 546). Simmel’s (incomplete) correspondence is collected in GSG vols. 22 and 23, but a number of additional letters are included with other documents in vol. 24.

2. Simmel to Célestin Bouglé, December 13, 1899 (GSG 22: 342–44). Simmel would use stronger words on other occasions, as when he wrote Georg Jellinek that it was an idiocy to regard him as a sociologist (March 20, 1908; GSG 22: 617).

3. Klaus Christian Köhnke, Der junge Simmel in Theoriebeziehungen und sozialen Bewegungen [The Young Simmel in Theoretical Relations and Social Movements] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), 23.

4. However, Rickert complained to Emil Lask (unpublished letter of July 13, 1902, cited in editorial notes to Simmel’s letter to Rickert of June 23, 1902, GSG 22: 422) about Simmel’s arrogance, saying: As much as I recognize Simmel’s superiority . . . I also think that I objectively deserve a bit more respect than Simmel is inclined to dispense to me from his infinite height.

5. See Klaus Christian Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 305.

6. In the first (and still most recent) book in English on Simmel as philosopher, Rudolph Weingartner writes, Simmel’s philosophy is but one of life—human life—and its products: culture. Weingartner, Experience and Culture: The Philosophy of Georg Simmel (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1962), 12.

7. Simmel to Keyserling, October 13, 1908 (GSG 22: 666). Simmel has sometimes been portrayed as a Bergsonian, so it is worth noting that immediately before the passage just cited, he remarks that since Keyserling and others had suggested that Bergson’s tournure d’esprit [mind-set; in French in the original], was related to my own, he would try to incorporate his work despite having quite enough of myself through the daily 24-hour-long being-myself. Gregor Fitzi dates the beginning of closer contact between Bergson and Simmel to this period (1908–9), when Simmel had long since reached his mature views, but notes that they had opportunities to become aware of one another earlier through the mediation of Léon’s journal [i.e., the Revue de métaphysique et de morale—EG] and through international philosophical congresses" (Fitzi, Soziale Erfahrung und Lebensphilosophie: Georg Simmels Beziehung zu Henri Bergson [Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2002], 50).

8. In his Goethe, Simmel set out to project the Goethean life, this restlessness of self-development and productivity, onto the plane of the timelessly significant thought by exploring what he identified as a third distinct from both the life and the work in which it found expression: the pure meaning, the rhythm and significance of the essence, analogous to a concept, which is realized both in the soul that thinks it and in the thing whose content it defines. Riffing on Goethe’s characterization of his own oeuvre, Simmel admits that such a writing of this third, this ‘idea Goethe’ must become the exegete’s own confession (GSG 15: 7–270; all citations here from pp. 9–10).

9. Margarete Susman, Die geistige Gestalt Georg Simmels (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1959), quoted here from pp. 4–5. See also www.margaretesusman.com/index.html.

10. See Thomas Bedorf, Joachim Fischer, and Gesa Lindemann, eds., Theorien des Dritten. Innovation in Soziologie und Sozialphilosophie (Munich: Fink, 2010), and my Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form, Colloquia Germanica 45, nos. 3–4 (2012): 239–63.

11. Susman, Die geistige Gestalt Georg Simmels, 35–36.

12. Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen ist Wissenschaft von der menschlichen Gesellschaft geworden ("Das Problem der Sociologie [1894], GSG 5: 52–61; here p. 52). I generally translate Mensch as human being but defer to the (sexist) tradition in this case to avoid obscuring the historiographical and theoretical resonance of the phrase.

13. Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1999), 1: 883.

14. In Simmel’s defense, as Anthony Grafton writes, the intellectuals of the nineteenth century did not view [footnotes] with the unmixed admiration and affection one might expect. Hegel, for example, clearly rebelled against the idea that a philosopher’s text should use footnotes to exemplify and carry on a dialectical argument (Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997], 97).

15. Hans Blumenberg, Geld oder Leben. Eine metaphorologische Studie zur Konsistenz der Philosophie Georg Simmels, in Äesthetik und Soziologie um die Jahrhundertwende: Georg Simmel (henceforth AuS), ed. Hannes Böhringer and Karlfried Gründer (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976), 130.

PART I

Cold Cash and the Modern Classic

Simmel did not become a classic . . . [he was] more a philosophizing diagnostician of his era with a social-scientific touch than a philosopher and sociologist solidly rooted in the scientific enterprise.

Jürgen Habermas (1983)*

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Simmel’s Modernity

Marginality at the Center: Georg Simmel in Berlin

Georg Simmel’s marginality began during his lifetime, with an academic career that combined international fame with a long series of rejections and professional slights at the hands of the German professoriate. The author of more than two dozen books and hundreds of articles—an oeuvre comprising everything from thick tomes on moral philosophy and sociology to feuilletonistic fluff—Simmel published best-selling works of metaphysical speculation as well as a remarkably diverse range of essays on art historical, literary, sociological, and cultural topics. The critical edition of his works runs to twenty-four volumes, including two of letters, which by no means capture the original breadth of his correspondence, much of which has been lost forever. With his capacious and flexible mind and wide-ranging interdisciplinary interests came notable rhetorical talent, and Simmel enjoyed considerable fame in his own lifetime as a writer and speaker both in Germany and abroad. Significantly, though, he remained at the margins of the academic establishment.

Simmel was a philosopher and sociologist of recognized scholarly stature; he was also what we would today call a public intellectual. Recent research has underlined his impact beyond academic circles, including on key figures in the new social movements of the day, such as the feminist Helen Stöcker and the expressionist writer and pathbreaking homosexual rights activist Kurt Hiller.¹ He was also a fabled conversationalist, whose circles extended from Marianne and Max Weber to Rainer Maria Rilke,² from Edmund Husserl and Heinrich Rickert to Auguste Rodin and Stefan George. George Santayana called him the brightest man in Europe.³

For many years one of Berlin’s Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität’s most prominent intellectual figures, Simmel was a popular and influential teacher in the philosophy department (where he had also studied) from 1885 to 1914. His lecture courses, ranging over all five branches of philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and logic—in addition to sociology, became a Berlin tradition. Hearers came from far and wide to experience a thinker who, in the words of one of the many eulogies published at his death, fostered the rehabilitation of philosophy and exercised a more powerful influence on the spiritual development of the younger generation than the majority of his colleagues in the philosophical chairs of Germany.⁴

With his vibrantly embodied delivery, Simmel appeared to be thinking aloud, and he was able to convey the most abstract ideas in such an animated fashion that, as the literary critic Paul Fechter recalled, the listener’s thinking along also came to life and understanding arose of its own accord.⁵ According to his admirers, Simmel’s popularity was not due merely to his rhetorical brilliance. In the presence of this genuinely cosmopolitan intellect, the philosopher Karl Joël wrote, one felt that the zeitgeist itself had come to life.⁶ For Fechter, he had a Zeitinstinkt, an instinctive feel for the times, that allowed him to give form to the intellectual and social transformations under way and provide what his hearers most needed, "an interpretation of the era [Zeitdeutung] starting from the modern."⁷

Many others remembered him in similar terms. Simmel’s unusually public success as a philosopher was grounded in a cosmopolitan sensibility that resonated powerfully with his Berlin audiences. Skeptical, analytical, and highly sensitive, he experienced the modern world with visceral intensity—and strove to capture that experience and make it intelligible in speech and writing.⁸ Simmel regarded a wide range of hitherto unexamined phenomena as worthy of philosophical attention, and he was often accused of uncritically embracing all things new. In fact, his analytic attitude was considerably more ambivalent. If his contemporaries saw him as a personification of the zeitgeist, it was not simply because he epitomized the hypersensitive modern urban subject, but also on account of his deep awareness of the cultural costs of freedom and of the intimate losses suffered in pursuit of subjective autonomy.

Simmel’s cosmopolitan sensibility, a distinctive combination of immersion in and distanced reflection upon the complex and contradictory achievements of modern society, provided the lived foundation for what I call his modernist style of philosophizing. His texts do not, as has so often been asserted, simply affirm or uncritically register modern experience, with all its fragmentation and contradictoriness, but embody a mode of reflection deliberately shaped by the striving to make the modern world intelligible on its own terms. From his genuinely cosmopolitan, that is to say, reflective and self-reflective, perspective, the fascination of the moment, the allure of the particular, provided an occasion, not an end, for thought. But the philosophical sophistication of Simmel’s approach to the contradictory plenitude of modern experience has gone largely unrecognized, with even his advocates tending to overemphasize moments of apparent immediacy, of immersion in particularity, while downplaying and neglecting the countervailing movements of negation and distancing that also mark his style of thought.

Writing in the Hannoverscher Kurier on the tenth anniversary of his teacher’s death, the philosopher, critic, and literary scholar Ludwig Marcuse attempted to capture what made him stand out as a philosopher, and not only among those of this century. Recalling Simmel’s objection to imprison[ing] the fullness of life in a symmetrical systematic, he powerfully evokes an intellectual style that combined a maximum of receptivity, of experiential breadth and depth with a maximum of intellectuality, scholasticism, Talmudism, addiction to rationalization, adding that Simmel’s sensual-soulful sensitivity created an uncommonly rich substance for his possession by thought (BdD, 189).

Marcuse goes on to describe Simmel’s distinctive form of dialectical thought, his relativism, as lived experience: We loved in Simmel the fascinating event that a human being of enormous experiential capacity repeatedly penetrated through all conceptual boundaries into unconceived spaces of the soul, then captured them in concepts only to find these in turn left behind by new experiencing (BdD, 189–90). Writing for an audience that shared this living memory of the teacher and philosopher, Marcuse invoked and affirmed Simmel’s posthumously published prediction: Why did he die without spiritual heirs? Because he was (as Rickert once called him) the systematizer of the unsystematic. However, Marcuse writes, Only the dogmatic concept can become tradition (BdD, 190).

Simmel’s cosmopolitan fascination with emerging forms of individual and collective experience gave rise to a new relativist approach to philosophizing, to new kinds of cultural inquiry and modes of reflection on the phenomena of everyday life. Such investigations always had high theoretical stakes: Simmel was striving to modernize philosophy, to achieve reflective traction on the historical and philosophical situation of modern western Europe and on the lived experience of those inhabiting and constituting that world.

Yet it is a mistake to think of this modernist philosopher as a philosopher of modern experience. For Simmel the entire relation between philosophy and experience was at stake, as it was for Kant and Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche before and Husserl and Heidegger after him.⁹ While emphasizing philosophical problems that had gained particular urgency under modern historical and sociocultural circumstances, he did not develop a philosophy, much less a sociology, of modernity. Beginning with the phenomena of everyday life, Simmel led his listeners to timeless questions using a distinctive synecdochic logic that anchored the most abstract ideas in historical particularity. As the testimony of contemporaries shows, it was most of all this gift for making philosophical questions relevant to human existence that accounted for his appeal.

Like Hegel, that other great master of synecdoche, Simmel found philosophical entrée in the most insignificant features of everyday life. The novelist Frank Thiess recalled his incredible ability to concretize an abstract process and knack for discovering the most inspired examples:¹⁰ in two years of study in Berlin, I never heard an hour that was more interesting, riveting, animated, and exciting, than Simmel’s logic lectures (BdD, 177).

Simmel’s modernist pedagogy opened up new vistas for thought. For the novelist Georg Hermann, he was an anatomist of the ultimate stirrings of the soul that in others took place deep in the darkness of the subconscious, the idol of youth who became the greatest experience of our years at the university (BdD, 163). Simmel proclaimed a ‘turning away from mere thought’ and believed that the immediacy of existence could be experienced ‘only in its own profundity,’ Ludwig Marcuse recalled. This thinker who abhorred the robustness of manipulable formulations thus lived on in the memory of his students as the original image of a philosopher (BdD, 190–91).

Simmel’s rhetorical brilliance and his gift for connecting philosophizing to lived experience were, then, placed at the service of the most intimate, yet most traditional, of pedagogical ends. In the words of the twentieth-century Dutch American geostrategist Nicholas Spykman,¹¹ Simmel aided his students in finding themselves rather than propagating a doctrine of his own (BdD, 187).¹² His private seminars were formative philosophical experiences for thinkers as diverse as Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, Bernhard Groethuysen, György Lukács, Karl Mannheim, Gustav Radbruch, Max Scheler, Margarete Susman, and Leopold von Wiese.

Simmel’s cosmopolitan approach attracted a cosmopolitan audience. From early in his career, his lectures and private seminars drew admirers from afar—from North and South America as well as eastern and western Europe and Japan.¹³ Before the turn of the century, his lecture courses had already taken on the character of public events and were held in the largest auditoria of the Berlin University. But Simmel’s popularity and the diversity of his audience were a source of suspicion. In a fateful denunciatory letter, the historian Dieter Schäfer, a student of the nationalist Heinrich von Treitschke’s, called attention, not only to the large numbers of women attending Simmel’s lectures,¹⁴ but to many listeners from the Oriental world . . . streaming toward [Berlin] out of eastern lands among his audience.¹⁵

If Simmel’s public success reflected the rhetorical talent that made him an unusually gifted teacher and lecturer, it nonetheless rested on solid academic credentials. In no small part due to his attempts to lay the theoretical groundwork of sociology, Simmel gained international scholarly recognition well before the publication of his masterwork, Philosophie des Geldes (translated as The Philosophy of Money), in 1900. The earliest commentaries on his work appeared not in Germany but in France, the first in 1894—a full twenty years before he finally received a regular professorship. The first book-length monograph on his work (likewise in French) was published the same year he left Berlin for Strasbourg,¹⁶ but well before 1914, Simmel’s intellectual impact had been reflected in literature in Czech, Russian, and Italian as well, and his work had been translated into an even wider range of languages, including Danish and Polish. The earliest English translation was an excerpt from his Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft (Introduction to Moral Science) that appeared in the International Journal of Ethics in 1893, shortly after the German original was published.

The efforts of Simmel and his supporters to secure him a position commensurate with his talents and achievements were nevertheless repeatedly rebuffed. In the charged atmosphere of fin de siècle Berlin, his public success only exacerbated his status as academic outsider. By 1910, he had acquired a certain ironic resignation, writing a colleague: German officialdom takes me for a kind of ‘corrupter of the young,’ and I shall thus surely never receive a professorship—even when, as happened two years ago, the Heidelberg department, indeed, the whole university (as the rector at the time put it), supported me in a way that had not happened for any appointment in years.

Simmel added that he enjoyed great pedagogical success—numerically speaking among the best in the country—and that "the area of my philosophical activity is about the most extensive of any German professor. It encompasses the entire history of philosophy, logic and psychology, ethics and aesthetics, the philosophy of religion, sociology, and the philosophy of right."¹⁷ But neither his success as a teacher nor the breadth of his course offerings necessarily accrued to his advantage. There was considerable hostility to Simmel, as well as to what he represented—not only the entry of Jews into the university, but also unconventional scholarship that questioned established assumptions and even institutions.¹⁸

Correspondence with the aforementioned rector of Heidelberg University, the legal philosopher Georg Jellinek, in early 1908 illustrates Simmel’s considerable insight into the difficulty of his position. His appointment to the Heidelberg chair formerly held by Kuno Fischer initially seemed virtually assured—he was in the second position on the list sent to the ministry in February, and Heinrich Rickert, whose name was first, wanted to remain in Freiburg.¹⁹ Upon learning that the minister of culture was reconsidering the matter for various reasons, Simmel responded with considerable equanimity, treating the delay as a routine bureaucratic development and proceeding to put forward tentative plans for taking up the post in Heidelberg in the coming semester.²⁰

But a conversation with an unnamed official of his acquaintance awakened familiar concerns and prompted him to write to Jellinek again the following day. Simmel was widely regarded, he had been told, as a purely critical spirit, who teaches students only the critique of everything and thus has a destructive effect, tending toward mere negation—an opinion, the man had assured him, that was consistently joined with the greatest recognition of your professional achievement. Palpably alarmed, Simmel continued,

As I heard these words, it suddenly went through my head—with the conviction that we sometimes have for entirely unproven things—that the minister’s reservations of which you hinted to me can be traced to this, probably only to this opinion. He will have heard from someone or other that I am a hypercritical, merely analytical thinker who corrupts the young in a properly Socratic way.²¹

His letter attempts both to explain and to combat the putative charge.

The source of the problem lay, Simmel thought, in a work he had published sixteen years earlier, Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft, "admittedly a critical book. Since then I have been cursed for only offering negativities, and everything positive that I have done since then has been unable to eliminate this aliquid haerens [thing sticking to me]. But he had long since left behind his youthful stance: I don’t believe that there can be a book more averse to mere critique and more positively oriented toward the understanding of history and life than the Philosophy of Money. As for his teaching, one could dispute the worth of his lectures, but to call them merely critical would be nothing less than a falsification of the facts, for he shared Nietzsche’s view: ‘where you don’t love, you should pass over.’"²²

Simmel had correctly discerned that his seemingly certain appointment in Heidelberg was endangered. He wrote Max Weber the same day, beginning by rehearsing the accusation that he was an exclusively critical, even destructive spirit and that [his] lectures lead only to negation and continuing:

Probably I don’t need to tell you that this is a terrible falsehood. Like all of my work, my lecture courses have for many years been directed exclusively toward the positive, toward the establishment of a deeper understanding of world and spirit, with a complete abstention from polemic and critique with respect to other positions and theories. Anyone who understands my lectures and books at all can only understand them thus.²³

Beneath his exasperation at the idea that the professional judgment of the Heidelberg philosophical faculty might be set aside on the basis of deliberate distortions of the record, Simmel was clearly beginning to come to terms with the possibility that this prestigious and seemingly assured professorial appointment would come to nought. He closed on a high note, remarking that however things turned out, what the whole process had revealed was "a thousand times more valuable to me than any sort of external success can be, the respect and love of so many and of such people."²⁴

In fact, the defamation of Simmel as a purely critical spirit was only part of the story. Like other humanistic traditions in the rapidly evolving intellectual landscape of the previous fin de siècle, the discipline of philosophy was being professionalized and institutionalized, and its academic representatives were engaged in very practical struggles to defend the integrity of their enterprise in the face of the meteoric rise of new kinds of scientific enterprises. Social and natural scientific approaches were making both theoretical and practical inroads into formerly philosophical territory. With upstarts like sociology and experimental psychology competing for intellectual adherents and institutional resources, it was becoming necessary to differentiate and define the discipline in new ways.

In this context, Simmel’s frankly modernist mode of philosophizing—from his avowed relativism and unusual topics and style of thought to unconventional behavior that included publicly engaging in contemporary political controversies and associating himself with movements striving for social and cultural change—was hardly conducive to academic success. Moreover, despite his philosophical qualifications, including publications that from the beginning of his career ranged over ethics, aesthetics, the philosophy of history, and the history of philosophy, Simmel had become indelibly associated with an emergent field widely identified, not without reason, with socialist tendencies. Even his institutional supporters regarded sociology as a hotbed of superficial scholarship.²⁵

By 1908, Simmel’s professional difficulties were already long-standing. Thanks to his experimental spirit and unconventional behavior, he had already encountered considerable institutional difficulties with the philosophical faculty at the Berlin University. His proposed dissertation, Psychological-ethnological Studies on the Origins of Music, seems to have been regarded as wildly inappropriate, and he was encouraged to submit in its place his prize-winning paper about Kant’s views on matter. A few years later, the efforts of Wilhelm Dilthey and Eduard Zeller in overcoming their colleagues’ objections to Simmel’s Habilitation submission (once again on Kant) had been rewarded by the candidate’s publicly insulting Zeller during the colloquium after his qualifying lecture.²⁶ Simmel had failed and been obliged to wait six months before repeating the process that would allow him to be officially accepted as a member of the faculty in 1885.²⁷

Predictably, in light of this rocky beginning, there was some hesitation among the members of Berlin’s philosophical faculty about promoting him. Simmel spent fifteen years as Privatdozent before at last receiving the title of Professor Extraordinarius in 1900, the year Philosophie des Geldes, his fourth book, appeared. And that recognition took a marginalizing and even insulting form that perfectly reflected official ambivalence toward this unconventional figure: Simmel’s appointment was unsalaried.²⁸ As Professor Extraordinarius he was excluded from most university business and could not supervise dissertations. While his fame continued to grow, several efforts to secure Simmel regular professorships in philosophy at other institutions were defeated at the highest levels.²⁹ By the time he finally